The Afterlives of Biopolitics

Abstract

Critical interventions on biopolitics in Latin America have a decades-long tradition fundamentally articulated around the politics of gender, sexuality, and race as challenges to classic understandings of the political. Debates on social normalization, health and illness, mestizaje and dissident sexualities clustered around some of the themes put forward by biopolitics: the interface between body and population, the arbitrary and therefore political construction of the “healthy” body, the logics of immunity, and so on. In recent years, this focus has changed. Increasing interest in the nonhuman and the inanimate pushes the threshold of critical conceptualizations of the bios in “biopolitics.” On the one hand, the question of the animal mobilizes previous uses of biopolitics by showing the extent to which bios had been assumed to be human, thus opening non-anthropocentric biopolitical approaches. On the other, the centrality of extractivism in Latin American economic and cultural history—and, of course, in the present—demands a shift in perspective to understand conceptions of the living that include the inanimate and the inorganic, the geological and the mineral, entailing discussion of Indigenous traditions that had previously been marginalized.